On the Fifth Sunday in Lent, the Cathedral offered a sung meditation on the Passion of Christ. The service constantly returns to the theme of Jerusalem’s rejection of God and Jesus Christ. Jerusalem here is a stand-in for the human city and the human heart. After the service, still caught up in the spell of the love of the cross and the story of the rejection of that love, some of our keen laypeople and a few of the local clergy went out together to a local restaurant. We were seated right by a large plate-glass window looking out on the busy street. Across the street from us was a bistro-bar. It also had a plate-glass window, and we could look across the street and into the bar and see that it was absolutely mobbed.
It was 5:30 on a Sunday afternoon, and you could see that there was tight standing room only inside the bar and a long line of young men and women waiting to get in. There was a security guard at the door, and he was only letting in a few women at a time.
After a few moments, three young women came out of the club onto the street. They were beautiful young women, scantily clad, and clearly very drunk. They moved down the street a short distance and one took out her phone. She was holding the phone so the other two could hear the music and the three began to dance with great enthusiasm in a very vulgar way that struck me as a kind of whistling past the graveyard.
Then one of the young women sat down on the curb and leaned over with a bodily grace that had not been evident in the dance and threw up into the gutter again and again until she was well and truly done. The other two hugged her and petted her but did not stop dancing. It takes more time to write this than it did to see it.
I pulled my eyes away from this scene, which was difficult, because I had to turn my chair away from the window to get it all out of my direct line of sight. I was not allowed to turn away. Instead, my gaze was turned toward a litany of people who came before me, one after the other. They were all ages and all circumstances. Some were very successful and some in dire straits. Some with health and some with crippling chronic illness. Too many alone and lonely. More than one had propped themselves up in ways that I could see would soon fail. They were all people I know, whom I meet and speak with routinely. They were all outside the orbit of the church. They were all cut off from the ordinary means of grace. I could see more clearly than I wanted to see that they were all suffering in the same way as the children dancing in the street and were all easy prey for the destroyer of souls.
How can I describe this vision without sounding self-righteous and censorious? That was not what I felt. I felt wounded. I felt grief. I felt a renewed zeal for souls. Here were beautiful children dancing on the edge of a dangerous precipice. Here were friends on the brink of an abyss of despair. Here was our adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walking about seeking whom he may devour.
The Holy Spirit brings things to light and convicts us of sin. The scales from my eyes fell and I saw the life-and-death struggle of souls on my right hand and on my left. I had a sudden horror at my complacency, at my practical universalism, a happy and unacknowledged conviction that most people are going to be ok and with God in the end. Words from Tolstoy haunt me: “After a stupid life, a stupid death.” What could possibly save these children on the street and this litany of sufferers from despair?
The words of an old Spiritual come to me: “Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Yes, and the power of his resurrection. To proclaim the death and resurrection of the Lord until he comes again is literally, actually, and practically a matter of life and death. It is life and death to us, first of all, since faith grows by sharing. And to quote Milton, it is life and death to “the hungry sheep who look up and are not fed.”
Or as Richard Baxter, another spiritual writer from the Milton’s age put it,“we speak as dying men to dying men; there is no time for embroidery.” On a Sunday afternoon, the Holy Spirit visited me and stabbed me in the heart and brought these truths home to me anew.
We want our churches to grow. I want my congregation to grow. I think churches can grow. I think they will grow as the Holy Spirit convicts us and causes us to see more clearly the souls in peril on our right hand and our left and to see more clearly the crucified and risen Savior as the one hope of the world.
This is something different than being clever about recruiting. The energy for recruiting will always sputter out. There is something like spiritual adrenaline that will cause us very naturally to pray for and reach out to the dancers, to the despairing, to those we perceive in peril, and energize us to share the hope that is in us.
“And now again we exhort you, in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye have in remembrance, into how high a Dignity, and to how weighty an Office and Charge ye are called: that is to say, to be Messengers, Watchmen, and Stewards of the Lord; to teach, and to premonish, to feed and provide for the Lord’s family; to seek for Christ’s sheep that are dispersed abroad, and for his children who are in the midst of this naughty world, that they may be saved through Christ for ever.” (From the Ordinal of the American Book of Common Prayer, 1928)
The Very Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding, dean of the Cathedral of All Saints in Albany, is entering his fourth decade as a priest of the Episcopal Church.
